It would be grotesque to say that Friday’s earthquake and tsunami are anything but a catastrophe for Japan. We still have little sense of the total number of people killed, or the full extent of the damage, or when the nuclear plants will be stable. As a human disaster, it is still overwhelming.

One of the curiosities of the past week has been American survivalists’ response to the turmoil in the Arab world. Their online sites, well decorated with ads for handguns, recommend that you start stockpiling food and petrol, for fear that Saudi Arabia might soon join the revolutions. They’re

After Hosni Mubarak, Barack Obama is the greatest loser from the revolution in Egypt. Or, more baldly, America is. The daily traffic may begin to flow around Tahrir Square more normally this morning, with all the honking, dust, heavily laden trucks, and the odd thin brown horse pulling a cart. But

The eruption in Egypt is partly the product of complacency, by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak and by a series of presidents of the United States. It’s the result of a persistent failure to offer a large number of people any realistic prospect that the material condition of their lives will

The share-swap that BP has announced with Rosneft, the Kremlin-controlled oil group, in order to press ahead with exploration in the Russian Arctic makes a familiar point with new sharpness. Many of the best opportunities for exploration of combustible resources are in troublesome regions

Questions about whether countries can go bust are still a pressing theme at the start of the year, but as a variation, there is now the drama about whether American cities will go bust. It’s been the subject of alarms in the bond markets for the past three weeks, for a good reason. It promises to

The next year will feel as if it belongs to China. You could make the list of the stars of 2011 much longer than that, adding in Indonesia, India, Brazil, Turkey and about a third of Africa (particularly South Africa and Egypt). You might then move on to Mexico and even, just possibly, Iran. It is

We have seen the two faces of Chinese diplomacy over the past few weeks. In Wen Jiabao’s first visit to New Delhi for five years, the Chinese Prime Minister was assured, able to acknowledge India’s concerns about its old rival over the Himalayas, but determined enough to deepen trade that his

The euro crisis has been made worse by the many-sided refusal to face the need to write down the sovereign debt of the stricken countries, and of some of their banks. Germany purports to have recognised the problem, but has ducked it. Until it is confronted, there is no orderly way of keeping the

If you are asking why North Korea is yet again firing shells south, I would put the spread of South Korean and Chinese television into the previously impenetrable domain as an unexpected new factor. All right, preparations for the succession to Kim Jong Il, the Supreme Leader, are the root cause